Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 22

Every house on Cabot Drive looked peaceful and settled for the night as Henry and I drove slowly toward the Richmonds' house. Many of the Richmonds' neighbors still had Christmas lights wrapped and blinking in their trees, and a few still had decorated trees standing solemnly in their front windows, even though it was a week into the new year and the holiday had since long passed. It was a very strange sensation to be in my own hometown and yet feel like I was trespassing. I'd driven down Cabot Drive at least a hundred times in my life, but this was the first time when I felt paranoid enough to consider sliding lower in my seat to avoid non-existent passers-by on the street from seeing me in Henry's truck.

"Just wait here until I come back to get you," Henry instructed after pulling into his driveway, shutting off the truck's engine. He had parked next to the red Prius that had belonged to Olivia, her sixteenth birthday present from her parents. I'd assumed that they'd sold her car after her death, but upon seeing it again I realized they must have been just keeping it in the garage until the inclement winter weather began, when they needed the space instead for Mr. and Mrs. Richmond's more expensive vehicles. The windows of the Richmonds' house were dark, not surprisingly, since it was one o'clock in the morning.

"Do you think your parents are still up?" I asked, alarmed. I didn't know Randy and Beth Richmond too well, but if they were at all like my mom, there was no way they were going to approve of Henry inviting a girl who he'd just assisted in escaping from reform school to spend the night in their house.

"Probably not, but with my mom, ya never know," Henry said. "I'm just going to run inside and open up the back door from the laundry room. I should probably grab a pair of Olivia's old shoes, too, right?"

I looked down at my damp socks and nodded, not looking forward to traipsing through the thick snow around to the back of the Richmonds' house without shoes on my feet. Henry offered me a quick smile and then slipped out of the truck, closing the door as quietly as possible behind him. He trotted up the Richmonds' front path and up the two little cement stairs leading to their front landing, and then he unlocked the front door and disappeared into the house.

Then I was alone, completely alone in the rapidly cooling cab of the pick-up truck. The street was painfully silent, completely free from passing traffic. I wondered if Henry's parents had been wondering where he was at such a late hour when they'd turned in for the night, or if he didn't have a curfew anymore since graduating from high school. Even without a curfew, there weren't many places for an eighteen-year-old guy to spend time in Weeping Willow after ten o'clock at night other than Bobby's, and all of the guys with whom Henry had hung out in high school were away at their own colleges. I remembered back in the fall, when Trey and I had run into him near the ice cream shop, that he'd said he was taking a semester off from Northwestern, but now it was January. Surely his next semester had to be starting soon, if it hadn't stared already. I'd been so self-absorbed in my own plight at Dearborn and in trying to uncover as many details as possible about Violet before this ski trip, it had never once occurred to me to ask him what was going on in his own life.

More than two minutes passed, and the house showed no signs of life inside. I shivered in the front seat of the truck and wondered if Mischa was fast asleep at the Preet Wellness Center so many miles away, or if she was being tormented by curiosity about our progress. Surely, at that hour, both the Portnoys and my mom had been alerted by the respective authorities that we were missing. My mother was probably pacing a ditch into the floor at our house, enraged and hurt that I'd obviously been lying to her over Christmas break about my commitment to staying on a path of good behavior. Phone calls had probably been made to my dad to inform him that I was on the run. He was probably pointing fingers at Mom and doing his best to make her feel like an inadequate parent for not having had any idea that I'd obviously been scheming my escape for quite some time.